Snyder's Soapbox: Where are the best fans in baseball? Cardinals can't seem to draw a crowd

St. Louis sits just three games out of playoff position but Busch Stadium has rarely looked emptier

Welcome to Snyder's Soapbox! Here, I pontificate about matters related to Major League Baseball on a weekly basis. Some of the topics will be pressing matters, some might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and most will be somewhere in between. The good thing about this website is that it's free, and you are allowed to click away. If you stay, you'll get smarter, though. That's a money-back guarantee. Let's get to it.

Let me start here with a true story. I'm sure some will claim I made it up and that's OK (I'm often far too skeptical on stories like this, so I get it). I was waiting in line at Cedar Point, the enormous Ohio amusement park, earlier this year. I could hear a loud conversation behind me between a middle-aged woman from the St. Louis area and a father-adult son combo (50ish and 20ish), who also happened to be from the St. Louis area. At one point, the woman asked why she sees so many empty seats at Cardinals games this season. The son started to say it's because the Cardinals haven't been good for a long time and the woman said, "then we can't say we're the best fans in baseball." 

I don't make a habit of diving into conversations of others, but I would have loved to thank her.

Have you seen all the empty seats in Busch Stadium this season? Just watch this go-ahead, two-run double Monday night and look at the crowd shots:

Now, there are excuses to be made, I'm sure. One of those might be that the Cardinals were playing the worst team in baseball, the Rockies. First off, if a fan base is the best in baseball, the opponent shouldn't matter. Secondly, here's a fun fact: Coors Field, home of the Rockies, has averaged higher attendance per game this season than Busch Stadium has. Seriously. The Cardinals are currently averaging 29,037 fans a night at home, behind teams like the Angels, Rangers and Diamondbacks.

Sure, the Cardinals were sellers in front of the trade deadline, they are only three games out of a playoff spot right now. Three games! That's totally workable. 

So, I ask the obvious question: Where are the best fans in baseball? 

The easy and obvious answer, and a ton of Cardinals fans know this to be true: There is no one fan base better than any other in sports. Pretty much every fan base is simply a cross-section of sports fandom at large. You have a large swath of very good fans. You have a good selection of total clowns. You have a group of casual fans who show up when the team is great and don't when the team isn't. That's just how it is with every fan base.

Sure, some come off as more entitled than others because cheering for a more consistent winner does that to you. That's where the Cardinals "best fans in baseball" thing came from in the first place. They were basically always good. They won 11 World Series titles, rarely going multiple decades between. From 2000-2022, the Cardinals made the playoffs 16 times. They had a losing record just one time and they were 78-84, hardly terrible. 

It's very easy to pack the house every single night and have that ballpark rockin' when your team is always winning. 

The funny thing is, times aren't even that hard right now. The Cardinals went 83-79 last season and, as established, they are only three games out of a playoff spot right now. 

I'm not saying the Cardinals fan base is worse than that of any other team. It isn't. All I've ever said is that it's not special. And it isn't. It isn't special in a negative or positive way. It's just a fan base that got to root for an incredibly successful team for a long time and it got spoiled -- apparently to the point that being within striking range of a playoff spot on Aug. 12 isn't very exciting for them. That's too bad. The best fans in baseball would be enjoying the chance to move into a playoff spot in a season where the bracket is wide open.